Tuesday, October 14, 2003
Is Bush's War Plan Scarier Than He's Saying?
You'd think Bush might be more conciliatory about the lack of effectiveness his unilateral foreign policy/preemptive military action stance has had in light of the ongoing attacks and missteps in Iraq. But he's not according to the cover story article "The Widening Crusade" in this week's Village Voice written by Sydney H. Schanberg. Apparently, Bush would be happy to gear up for Iraq-style attacks in Iran and Syria. Read it and see (yet again) why this man scares the sh!t out of me and many others. Some people never learn from their mistakes. Fortunately, most of them aren't running the most powerful country on the planet.
I really hope the new Washington-based liberal think tank the Center for American Progress can get their act together and build a liberally-based alternative to the radical right agenda that currently seems to have the US (or at least the US government's public and, especially, foreign policy) in a headlock. Read about their efforts as led by John Podesta, Clinton's last White House chief of staff, in Matt Bai's October 12th New York Times Sunday Magazine acticle "Notion Building" here.
This needs to happen quiclky because American are currently too easliy swayed to the wrong response (i.e. the Iraq war) by things like this flash movie entitled "Blood of Heroes." As I said to my friend Shuggie Gray who kindly sent me this a couple of weeks back, it's scary to consider that the manipulation of this kind of imagery and rhetoric under the guise of "patriotism" was what got people revved up in support for the war in Iraq in the first place.
Meanwhile, the freedoms that soldiers are supposedly over there fighting to preserve are being quietly stripped away by the government under the guise of the Patriot Act. The blood of these heroes is being spilled needlessly in Iraq when places we should be confronting, like Saudi Arabia, Pakistan and Indonesia, who really do harbor terrorists, are labelled as allies and left untouched (huh?). Consider this too: what if someone did a fancy animated flash movie like this about the thousands of innocent Iraqi's and Afghanis who have been killed by the "War on Terror" since 9/11? How would we all feel about seeing something like that? One to grow on...
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I really hope the new Washington-based liberal think tank the Center for American Progress can get their act together and build a liberally-based alternative to the radical right agenda that currently seems to have the US (or at least the US government's public and, especially, foreign policy) in a headlock. Read about their efforts as led by John Podesta, Clinton's last White House chief of staff, in Matt Bai's October 12th New York Times Sunday Magazine acticle "Notion Building" here.
This needs to happen quiclky because American are currently too easliy swayed to the wrong response (i.e. the Iraq war) by things like this flash movie entitled "Blood of Heroes." As I said to my friend Shuggie Gray who kindly sent me this a couple of weeks back, it's scary to consider that the manipulation of this kind of imagery and rhetoric under the guise of "patriotism" was what got people revved up in support for the war in Iraq in the first place.
Meanwhile, the freedoms that soldiers are supposedly over there fighting to preserve are being quietly stripped away by the government under the guise of the Patriot Act. The blood of these heroes is being spilled needlessly in Iraq when places we should be confronting, like Saudi Arabia, Pakistan and Indonesia, who really do harbor terrorists, are labelled as allies and left untouched (huh?). Consider this too: what if someone did a fancy animated flash movie like this about the thousands of innocent Iraqi's and Afghanis who have been killed by the "War on Terror" since 9/11? How would we all feel about seeing something like that? One to grow on...
